Twenty-five years ago this morning, the sky over the whole East Coast was a clear, impossible blue. Most of us can still say exactly where we were standing when the second plane hit and the day stopped being an accident. Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven people did not come home that night. Thousands more have died in the years since from what they breathed while digging for the ones who did not. And for days afterward, no planes crossed the sky over Miami. Those of us who were here remember the quiet.
We use the word apocalypse to mean the end of everything. That is a translation error. In the Greek, the word means an unveiling, a curtain pulled back so you can finally see what was always there. The Jewish writers who invented that kind of writing were living under one empire after another. They set their stories in another time and filled them with beasts and stars and wheels of fire, and every image was about the street outside their window. The writing had one purpose: how to keep your soul alive under occupation, and how to say what the empire was doing without being killed for saying it. And the stories always end the same way. History stops. The old world ends. A new one is born, and in that world the captive goes free, the hungry are fed, and justice rolls down like water.
By that definition, September 11th was an apocalypse. The curtain came back. We saw that the towers we thought were permanent were not, that our safety had always been borrowed, and that we were more fragile and more connected than we had let ourselves know. And for about a week, the whole world stood with us. A French newspaper ran the headline “We are all Americans.” Young people in Tehran held candles in the street. Our allies invoked their mutual defense pact for the first time in its history. For one week, the door to a new world stood open. The old writers would have recognized it.
But that is not what we did, is it?
We answered with anger, and we answered with bombs. We took our friends into wars that ran for twenty years and made almost nothing stable, wars that fed the same humiliation and suffering that had fed the men on those planes. We let fear harden into policy. And four days after the towers fell, a Sikh man named Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot dead outside the gas station he owned in Mesa, Arizona, by a man who had decided a turban was the enemy. That morning, Mr. Sodhi had emptied his wallet into a fund for the victims in New York. When the truck pulled up, he was in his parking lot planting flowers in their memory.
Hold onto that image. We are going to need it.
It was a human reaction, all of it. Fear is human. Anger is human. Wanting someone to pay is as human as breathing. And none of it builds the world the old writers saw. Twenty-five years on, look at what grew instead. We are not safer. We are not at peace. We are not healed. We are more divided than we were on September 10th, and the conspiracy theories that were born in chat rooms about that very day now live in our pockets and wake us up at night. The reverberations have not stopped.
And here is the thing I cannot get past today. Tonight at sundown, the Jewish year 5787 begins. Rosh Hashanah, the head of the year. The liturgy for these days holds a line that stops me every time I read it: today the world is born. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day the world ended, our Jewish neighbors will light candles and say that today the world is born.
They know something about apocalypse. They wrote the genre. And their answer to the end of the world is ten days. The Days of Awe run from tonight through Yom Kippur, and they are built for exactly one thing: turning. The Hebrew word is teshuvah, and it means return, the way you return to a road you wandered off of. The tradition never asks whether you missed the mark this year. It assumes you did. The Hebrew word for sin is an archer’s word; it means the arrow landed somewhere other than where you aimed. So the question of these ten days is never whether you missed. The question is what you will do now that you know.
On Sunday morning, because the first day falls on the Sabbath, the shofar will sound in every synagogue in Miami at the same hour we gather in ours. Maimonides said the ram’s horn carries one message: wake up, you who are sleeping, look at what you have done, and return. On Sunday afternoon, families will walk to the edge of Biscayne Bay and throw bread into the water, casting off what they carried through the year. And at the center of it all is a text that says the coming year is being written, who will live and who will die, and then says the thing I believe with my whole humanist heart: turning, honest reflection, and tzedakah change what gets written. Tzedakah is usually translated as charity. Its root is the Hebrew word for justice.
You do not need a book in heaven to know that the year is unwritten. You do not need a God to sound the horn. You need honesty, ten days, and a decision. The oldest wisdom of our Jewish neighbors is that the end of a world is the beginning of the accounting, and the accounting is how a new world gets born.
So here is my hope on this anniversary. The world will not change tomorrow. We can. The world of September 12th, the one where the whole planet stood together and grief became understanding, did not disappear. It has been waiting for us for twenty-five years. It is waiting still. And it has never needed a nation to choose it. It needs a person.
It looks like learning the name of the neighbor whose faith you were taught to fear. It looks like refusing to forward the lie, even when the lie flatters your side. It looks like putting the phone down before the anger loads. It looks like showing up on Sunday for a service that will not pretend the ghosts are gone. It looks like turning, one degree, back toward the road you meant to walk. It looks like a man in a parking lot, planting flowers for strangers, four days after the end of the world.
Broken ground still receives seed. Twenty-five years is not too late. The horn sounds Sunday. Come and be awake with us.
To our Jewish members and neighbors, shanah tovah u’metukah. A good and sweet year. May we all be written for life.
Peace,
Rev. Dr. Harold Marrero